Scandalous Grace

I tend to chronically fail at sticking to New Year's resolutions. Comes March, I've already slipped back into my old ways; June's in full bloom and I've changed my resolutions at least ten times. In that respect, my life seems to be stuck on the same track - a recurrent confrontation with the painful truth of my own inadequacy and insufficiency. Jennifer Knapp captures it well in one of her songs: "For all the sin that lives in me, it took a nail to set me free, still what I do I don't want to do and so goes the story." In the midst of this, however, a hopeful wave of light has always broken through my darkness and just as C.S. Lewis puts it in The Four Loves, "Grace substitutes a full, childlike and delighted acceptance of our need, a joy in total dependence. The good man is sorry for the sins which have increased his need. He is not entirely sorry for the fresh need they have produced." With this new start before me, I am wanting to be taught how to wholly embrace my poverty and weakness in which His power is made perfect. I am wanting to catch more glimpses of His unfathomable grace of immeasurable depth. A grace which is utterly sufficient - no need to apply spiritual cosmetics - the "furious love of God" knows no season of change. New Year's resolutions attained or not, God loves inside out and pours out His grace afresh with each and every new day. We can glance upwards and be astonished to find the eyes of Jesus open with wonder, deep with understanding and gentle with compassion. God's extravagant grace just compells me to want to sink deeper into Him - I want to rise with the sun and be moved and amazed by His grace. That's my January resolution; my prayer. I want my deepest awareness of myself to be that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and that I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.

Lift up your eyes on high, and see who has created these things, who brings out their host by number; He calls them each by name, by the greatness of His might, and the strength of His power; not one is missing. (Isaiah 40:26)

When I consider Your heavens,
the work of Your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which You have set in place,
what is man that You are mindful of him,
the son of man that You care for him?
You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.

You made him ruler over the works of Your hands;
You put everything under his feet:
all flocks and herds,
and the beasts of the field,
the birds of the air,
and the fish of the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.

O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is Your name in all the earth!
(Psalm 8:3-9)

In the light of Your magnificent, inspiring, minutely detailed, wonderful and awesome creation, my heart cannot break enough for the love and grace that flowed out of Your wounds at Calvary - nor for the grace and love I am unceasingly lavished with as I proceed, unknowingly, through my days.

"This is the God of the gospel of grace. A God, who out of love for us, sent the only Son He ever had wrapped in our skin. He learned how to walk, stumbled and fell, cried for His milk, sweated blood in the night, was lashed with a whip and showered with spit, was fixed to a cross and died whispering forgiveness on us all." (Brennan Manning)